llongi's blog

The title says it all, the old PHP packages were finally masked!
Sorry for the three days delay (22 Apr instead of 19 Apr), but in the end, it's all done.
Again, thanks a lot to all the people involved in this, without their work this would have never been possible.

I've just committed some updates to dev-lang/php, two of which may interest you:

1) the "nls" USE flag, which previously enabled the gettext extension, the mbstring extension and the sqlite-utf8 support, now only enables the gettext extension.
The mbstring extension and sqlite-utf8 support were moved to the "unicode" USE flag. Affected ebuilds are already up to date.

2) the EXTRA_ECONF variable was added to dev-lang/php, that way you can easily pass your own configure parameters to the ebuild if you want to try out some crazy stuff, just do:

EXTRA_ECONF="--with-whatever-I-want" emerge dev-lang/php

Two little notes: the variable doesn't get saved between emerges, so you have to add it to the command line every time, and anything you do that way is totally unsupported, so don't ever file bugs about it, thanks.

UPDATE: it was now changed to EXTRA_ECONF instead of MY_CONF, to follow what a lot of other ebuilds already do.

Your friendly service announcement:

The PHP Herd announces that the old-style PHP packages, which were unsupported and deprecated for months, are finally going away.
After months of work, the team considers the new dev-lang/php package and the related dev-php[4,5]/ categories fully ready for production use, and encourage all users to upgrade.
Helpful informations can be found at the PHP project's pages, along with a HOWTO regarding the migration to dev-lang/php.
The old-style PHP packages (dev-php/php, dev-php/php-cgi, dev-php/mod_php, dev-php/PECL-*, and older dev-php/PEAR-* packages) will be package.masked on Wednesday, 19 April 2006, and removed from the Portage tree about a month later.